DARRELL NORMAN: Which milepost was that?

Friday

Sep 30, 2011 at 6:45 PM

A little ways back, I passed another milepost. Can’t tell you which one. This far down the road, the mileposts close ranks and their numbers blur. Mileposts have been racing past me lately, and there are more mileposts behind than ahead.

By Darrell NormanTimes Columnist

A little ways back, I passed another milepost. Can’t tell you which one. This far down the road, the mileposts close ranks and their numbers blur. Mileposts have been racing past me lately, and there are more mileposts behind than ahead.I have in the past found mileposts essential, but most people don’t pay them much attention. If they live in the city, they give directions by house number and street. If they hold onto country ways, they may tell you to take the left fork just past the old Johnson place, the one that burned to the ground 30 years ago.When I lived on a little farm on Lookout Mountain, I told new visitors to turn east onto Highway 35 in Fort Payne, turn left at Milepost 16 and look for a blue, two-story house on the left. I called my little navigational helper a mile marker then, as police, fire and road departments did and still do. I am calling it a milepost here for sentimental reasons.Long before I returned to Alabama and bought the blue house, I lived for five years in Alaska, where every place, even if it was not a place, was known by its milepost number. On our way out of Alaska, we drove the Alaska-Canada Highway, where our very lives depended on mileposts and “The Milepost” travel guide.The original Alaska Highway ran from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, 1,422 miles to Delta Junction, Alaska, 98 miles south of Fairbanks. Because most of the Alcan is in Canada, we measured our trip from Fairbanks to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan (I regret that we didn’t go to Saskatoon), near the crossing into the U.S. at Grand Forks, N,D., a distance of about 2,200 miles. “The Milepost” led us to places like Tok Junction, Burwash Landing, Kluane Lake, Watson Lake, Destruction Bay and Whitehorse, in the Yukon, where we swam in Takhini Hot Springs and dropped in on the first Arctic Winter Games, known as the Eskimo Olympics.I was driving a new International Scout, following a buddy who was pulling a Winnebago behind his Scout. Other than one night we stayed in a motel in Dawson Creek, to celebrate reaching Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway, we spent every night in the trailer. “The Milepost” guided us to the sparse places where we could buy gas and plug into an electric outlet, without which the truck engines would have frozen tight. It was early March, and temperatures often dropped to 50 below. Our sleeping bags froze shut, but we survived to tell the tale.As this ramble is about mileposts, you would expect it to contain more milepost numbers, and I had planned to be generous with them before I found that our mischievous household sprite, the one that hides books, had struck again.For three days I have been rifling through shelves and files in search of my 40-year-old “Milepost” and the little logbook we kept of where we stopped, how cold it was, how much we spent on gas, when the trailer had a flat, when a truck lost its oil plug, when a truck rattled its firewall wiring loose. I found the folding map that came with the book, but it doesn’t show mileposts.I know “The Milepost” is here somewhere because I have in hand “The Best of Robert Service.” Before my brother’s family embarked on an RV trip to Alaska a couple of years ago, I loaned him the book that contains “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and the book that once showed me the way to the marge of Lake Lebarge, where Sam at last got warm. Brother returned both on the same visit. So where did I lose the “Milepost?”When it eventually shows up, I may write about the experience of driving across the frozen Yukon River, just for fun. That was before they built a bridge to carry both vehicles and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline over the storied Yuke.That trucker show on television calls the Dalton Highway to the North Slope an “ice road.” It is instead an all-weather road, parts of it paved, that is covered with snow and ice in winter. Just as the Alcan was 40 years ago. The Yukon is at Milepost 56.

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